Engine failure for Button as Honda takes another difficult start to race weekend

As anticipated by the Honda Racing F1 Team, drivers Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button encountered another difficult start to their race weekend in Bahrain today. They ended the day 11th and 22nd.

With less than a week since the last race in Malaysia the drivers are working with the same package and today saw the expected repeat of the set-up woes evident at Sepang. Jenson experienced further frustration midway through the second session when he suffered an engine failure which caused him to stop out on the circuit.

Rubens Barrichello “Obviously we saw a good improvement towards the end of the afternoon and right at the close of the session the car was better than it has been at any other time today. We worked a lot on the car during the two sessions and made some major changes but there is a long way to go yet because we are nowhere near where we need to be with the balance.”

Jenson Button “The car is the same as it was in Malaysia so it would have been unrealistic for us to expect any improvement on where we were last week. However, we aren’t as slow as we appeared today because I only had the chance to run on old tyres in the second session before I had the engine failure. There is still work we can do on the balance to make the car a little bit better for tomorrow but we have a lot to do and it’s going to be another long, hard race.”

Jacky Eeckelaert, Engineering Director “We worked through our usual Friday race preparation. The temperatures are much higher than they were when we tested here in February, so this has changed the balance of the car. Rubens was able to complete all the planned runs but is still not quite happy with the set-up. Jenson suffered an engine failure and was unable to check his race set-up on both types of tyres. We have a lot of work to do overnight to try to improve for tomorrow.”